The British government’s plan to turn the Internet into a national intelligence cache that stores data on every U.K. Web surfer was frustrated Tuesday when Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, condemned such a move as a “destruction of human rights.”

The U.S. military bans FiveFingers shoes because they “detract from a professional military image”; Rupert Murdoch sells MySpace for a measly $35 million; and Google teams with the Getty Museum to create a smartphone application for art lovers. These discoveries and more after the jump.

The Supreme Court overturned California’s ban on violent video games; social networking sites may be effectively enhancing our social lives; and a case of public urination in Oregon forces a city to flush its reservoir. These discoveries and more after the jump.

Google has been pretty successful at just about everything its engineers have attempted, with the glaring exception of social media. Still getting trounced by Facebook and losing buzzshare to upstarts like Twitter and Foursquare, the company plans to get aggressive, starting with new social features in Gmail. (continued)

It’s pouring in Larry HQ, which makes it a better time than ever to read about guns and gals, China and America’s inferiority complex, military anthropologists and more. Soak it up after the jump. Many, many updates

It’s kind of sweetly dorky, like your grandpa finally figuring out how to use his iPod or something, but the Vatican has apparently discovered the late hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur and has gone so far as to include one of his songs, “Changes,” among a lineup of eight tunes on “The Vatican’s Playlist” (which has its own MySpace page!).

It’s official: Movie marketers can no longer afford to ignore social networking sites. This may strike some as a foregone conclusion (i.e., duh), but those in the industry who are still resisting the all-consuming pull of online vortexes like Facebook and Twitter are doing so at their own peril, according to the new “Moviegoers 2010” report.

It’s not entirely clear how the White House joining the cyber-ranks of MySpace, Facebook and Twitter will serve to make the American government more “transparent” and “efficient,” but perhaps micro-blogging will save our democracy ... or maybe we’ll get to hear about what Joe Biden had for lunch.

A Los Angeles judge on Tuesday ordered two Internet spammers to pay a record-breaking $230 million in fines after they sent more than 700,000 unsolicited advertisements to MySpace users. The amount is almost half what Rupert Murdoch spent to buy the social networking site in 2005.

Tom Hanks has a preferred candidate, but what makes his endorsement interesting is not the person he chooses, but how he frames that choice. This video, which appeared on the actor’s MySpace page, seems as much a comment on the celebrity endorsement as it is an endorsement by a celebrity.

Having just rebuffed a $42.1-billion offer from Microsoft, Yahoo Inc. has another suitor: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Although Murdoch is rich, he’s not Bill Gates rich, and MySpace, which is supposed to entice Yahoo into the deal, is so 2007. Murdoch detractors, therefore, should take pause, but not panic. The most popular news site on the Internet and Yahoo’s many other properties remain impartial, for now.

YouTube, MySpace and 11 other popular websites will no longer be accessible via U.S. military computers. A military spokesman says the move is meant to address bandwidth issues, but it’s no secret the military has been less than thrilled with the content sometimes posted by soldiers. Service members with personal computers will be unaffected, free to visit the Pentagon’s own YouTube channel.

Internet social network MySpace has developed a sophisticated national database of sex offenders it uses to police memberships and protect users, many of them minors. On Monday, the company announced it would share the information with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in an effort to aid law enforcement.(h/t: Sex Drive Daily)

Time announced its “person of the year” on Saturday, dissing everyone from Ahmadinejad to Pelosi in order to declare “you” the winner. Don’t you feel special? Specifically, the magazine highlighted websites including YouTube, Wikipedia and MySpace for “bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.”

The popular social networking site MySpace.com was once thought of as the frivolous province of teenagers and indie music geeks. But new research data shows a majority of U.S.-based MySpace visitors are, in fact, over 35 years old.

The Pentagon has grown concerned as more and more service members send personal combat videos—some set to music—to websites such as Youtube and Myspace. The military has no official policy on the practice, but rumors abound of behind-the-scenes pressure to limit the flow of footage out of Iraq.

In an effort to combat sexual predators’ use of social networking websites, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would effectively make sites like Amazon and MySpace inaccessible at public spaces.This is well-intentioned but horribly executed. Let’s hope the worse-than-“Do Nothing” Senate can keep this one from becoming law.

The National Security Agency is funding research into ways to collect personal information from social networking websites like MySpace and Friendster, according to New Scientist magazine. The agency reportedly aims to combine the information with details from banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.